Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro

English title: Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future

German title: Unsere Stimme von Erde, Erinnerung und Zukunft

Director: Marta Rodríguez    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Marta Rodríguez, * 1933, is a politically committed, independent anthropological filmmaker who uses documentary to analyze the living and working conditions and the world view of peasants, native peoples, and workers in her native Colombia. All of herdocumentaries have been made in collaboration with her spouse, Jorge Silva, who was best known as a cinematographer, a career he began after having worked as a still photographer.

Director: Jorge Silva    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Jorge Silva, *1941 in Girardot, Colombia, grew up in Bogotá. He studied literature and visual arts, and worked as a photographer and journalist. In the early 1960s, he became involved in the student film club movement and made his first film, Días de Papel. He and Marta Rodríguez met in 1965 and later married, and together they made their first joint film, Chircales (1971). In addition to their close collaboration in the following decades, he also worked as a DP on other projects. Jorge Silva died in 1987.

Country: Colombia

Year: 1981

Synopsis: The dominant subject of the films of Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva is the centuries-long oppression of farmers and indigenous peoples in Colombia, and their equally long resistance. While the early films analysed these conditions using a vocabulary informed by Marxism, indigenous cosmogony became more and more influential in their later work. The result of this clarification process – unthinkable without the critical participation of the indigenous farmers of Coconuco – is Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro, whose images no longer function as argumentative proof for eyewitness accounts, but rather form a tightly woven system of signs: furrows in the landscape, the backs of animals, the gestures of monuments, the myths and masks of the people and the breath that brings musical instruments to life. “Our cinema must also be beautiful, as beautiful as possible,” noted Jorge Silva of Nuestra voz de tierra when it first screened at the Forum in 1982. This digital restoration honours an important work of Latin American political cinema, one that doesn’t posit indigenous culture in romantic contrast to modernity, but rather recognizes in it an aesthetic of resistance.

Language: Spanish

Forum participation year: 1982

Forum catalogue PDF: Download